When you’re talking about adding road capacity for cars, you’re talking about increasing dependency on oil, and therefore dependency on foreign oil. Do you have a problem with that?

Okay, unlike everyone you’ve ever met, I took a five-day trip 30 years ago, paid for it on myself—it was half government people. I was either just finishing my term in the legislature or still in my last term. And a group of us, half public, half private, half Canadian, half American, chartered a 737 and had a well-thought-out trip where we basically stopped five times a day starting here, Spokane, going step by step all the way through Canada, Alaska, all the way up to Prudhoe Bay. This 737 had skis on it, landed places we’d never seen an airplane land before. A 737—like we were in a little Alaskan piper bush pilot plane.

Anyways, breakfast lunch and dinner… We stopped and saw some of the biggest hydroelectric facilities, natural gas… We saw Athabasca [oil sands] before anyone else. I’d never even heard of it. Saw that they already had $2 billion worth of extraction equipment up there, and it had five times the known oil reserves of Saudi Arabia—that was just one stop. We got to Anchorage, a spokesman there said—I’m not advocating this, but if the world were to decide the power itself, the world were to decide just to use coal from now on, and it could be solid, powder, liquid, gasified— It could be made to burn as clean— Within an hour and a half of Anchorage we have enough energy to power the world for 200 years.

So you would be for more drilling in Alaska?

Absolutely.